For the TWIO book, I relied on many tactics. Below are methods #11-22 I used or thought about using.

11.    Ask a Friend to Collect a Business Card: I was able to secure the email address of the most important person I needed for my book when a close friend of mine said she would be with him on a panel in Korea. In a way, this one business card triggered the whole book project, so it was anything but minor.

12.    Save Emails in Outlook: Whatever email system you are using, you should be sure to save the email addresses and names of important people when others share them with you or when you happen to correspond with them. You might be cc’d on an email wherein that person is also copied. Save their email! You may need it someday. You might also find an email in an article you are reading online or in print. When you do, save it. Over time, the list of emails accrues.

13.    Post Comment to Expert Blog or Facebook Account: Sometimes the person you desperately need an email for has a blog. If it is a public blog, you can often reply to this person’s most recent blog post and explain your situation while asking for her email address or other contact information (e.g., Facebook. MSN, or Skype account). A post to a blog is more personal. The chances of a response are at best 50-50. I have found that replies to a message sent to experts in Facebook or LinkedIn who are your friends are much higher than replies to a blog comment. Not too surprisingly, the famous person may not read comments and replies to his or her blog. So, I recommend you try to become a friend of a person in Facebook or LinkedIn before submitting a request for an interview or a paper that person has written.

14.    Post in Status in Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace: You might post an updated “status” report within your personal Facebook account that you need someone’s email or other contact information. Alternatively, you could send an email to your network in LinkedIn or Facebook indicating any connections or contact information you may need. Your social network can often provide it.

15.    Create a Group: You can create a group in Ning, Facebook, Yahoo! Groups, MSN Groups, or Google Groups related to the your book or a specific topic within it. Those who join the group might be key informants in the network. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the importance of salespeople, mavens, and connectors in getting ideas in and out of a group. Mavens who join your Google Group can provide everyone with the information they need, whereas connectors can lead you to the people you want to connect to. You might also be so bold as to create a fan group of sorts for the famous person in question and, at some point, ask members of that group for the contact information that they may have on him or her.

16.    Pay for Email Address Services: Some services appear where you search for a particular email. Some are geared for celebrity emails. In some cases, you may have to resort to paying for email addresses (and perhaps the physical address as well). I have never paid for one and I do not recommend it. If the celebrity has her email on a list somewhere that people are paying for, you can be pretty sure that she will have changed it.

17.    Ask Your Publicist or Publisher: Publicists and publishers handle many book projects and promotions, and, as a result, they contact and correspond with countless people you will never know. Tell your publicist or publisher the name of the person you need to contact for and see what they say.

18.    Hire Someone: You might hire someone to continue to search the Web and other sources for the email contact(s) of people you are striking out in finding. Your time is valuable. Hire someone at a reasonable rate to do this. For instance, I hired my son, Alex, to do such final checking of emails. He got me the address of Angus King, the former governor of Maine. King, when governor, had sponsored a groundbreaking and nationally-recognized laptop program in Maine. This project got every seventh and eighth grade student in the state a laptop, regardless of location or family income. This project was intended to make Maine’s students among the most computer literate in the world. While I ended up not using his email (not yet anyhow), it was great to get that address just in case. Now perhaps I can still use it as I create the e-book extension to the TWIO. What a great idea! I forgot I had this one.

19.    Collect Additional Emails: I also collected emails of professors who had used Thomas Friedman’s, The World Is Flat book, in their classes based on their posted online syllabi. I also gathered emails of those who had blogged or written reviews of his book as well as those who simply referred to it in articles they published. To do this, I paid someone to spend a week or so collecting thousands of additional emails in Excel files. I could review the list and look for emerging trends as well as people I knew. I knew that these people likely had some of the contact details I needed.

20.    Contact Media People and Writers: While unlikely, sometimes you can obtain the contact information of a famous person from someone who has written about him or her. I tried this approach a couple of times and contacted media people whose articles I used in my book. I could tell them that I found their article valuable for my project (which is true). If we got to know each other well enough, I might ask how they contacted the expert or well known person that they reference in their article or book and ask for advice in how I might also do that. It helps if you know that writer or media person. Along these same lines, if you have friends in the media industry, they might also be able to help you out.

21.    Bonus #1: Try the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive: One idea that I did not try out is to explore old websites using the Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (see http://www.archive.org/index.php). Assuming that the famous person once had his or her email posted (perhaps before becoming famous), with the Wayback Machine you can search old websites from 5 of 10 or nearly 15 years ago (1996 is the initial year listed) and see if his or her email was posted then. If it pops up and is still active, great! If not, well, it did not require much risk muscle. It is pretty harmless. All that is required is creativity in your search process and patience in waiting for sites you search for to come up.

22.    Bonus #2: Google Cached and Similar Pages: Sometimes a website no longer works, is being attached and is running slow, or is offline. You can still click on “cached” pages and find the data you are searching for. If effect, to help searchers like you out, Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and then caches or stores that version as a back-up for you. It uses the cached version of the document to determine if that page matches your query. Clicking on the cached content not only helps with finding emails but with articles you need to access for your book. I used this option several times for the TWIO book. Clicking on the “similar” button might also lead you to valuable resources.

So there you have it—20+ ways to obtain the email of an expert or famous person.  I am not suggesting you do anything unethical or questionable. There are limits. And there is sometimes a fine-line between research digging for an email and crossing too far into someone’s personal space. Please respect your fellow human beings. Think of what approaches you would find fair, moral, and ethical before trying any approach that might be deemed crossing that boundary zone.

Next, to obtain the quote, feedback, resources, endorsement, or review that you want, you have to figure out how to use any email and physical addresses you have gathered in a kind and gentle way. Be respectful. At the same time, be enthusiastic. You might ask that person to review the story that you have written about him or her to be sure it is complete and accurate. You should try to place an accurate yet unique and inviting subject in your email contact. For instance, while a title like my book poses many challenges to me as the writer, when I placed “The World Is Open endorsement request” in the subject line of my email, I got many responses that I would not have otherwise obtained. I was specific and honest. If I had just said, “Book Endorsement Request,” many of these emails would have been deleted immediately. Be creative yet genuine in your subject lines!

I have contacted hundreds of people during the past two years since I first starting working on the TWIO project. I have received feedback, of one type or another from most of them. That has made each day much more exciting than it would have been otherwise. You need courage. You also need the skills of how to contact people in the open world. Some of the tips above can make it happen. Please send me an email if you have additional ways to get in touch with someone that I have not thought of or listed above (my personal homepage is http://mypage.iu.edu/~cjbonk/).

I hope you have enjoyed my blog posts this week. I also look forward to hearing from some of you about my TWIO book (see http://worldisopen.com/). It was a huge undertaking. Now with a second one nearly done that will be a free e-book extension, I think I can say that my digital risk muscle has been exercised more in the past few years than ever before in my life. I recommend you exercise yours too. Happy readings and travels!

For the TWIO book, I relied on many tactics. Below are 20 methods I used or thought about using. These might be beneficial for you someday. I did not really use #21 though I did check out a few old websites of mine. Keep in mind that I likely had 20 more approaches that I am not listing here.

1.    Brainstorm a List of Known Information: The very first thing I did was create a list of people who were well known for the 10 technology trends that had made the world more open (Note: I called these the 10 openers as opposed to Friedman’s “flatteners”). I also included the names and emails of those people I personally knew within each opener. I then looked up the emails of people in the list that I still needed. I also asked my friends and colleagues for help when and where I needed it. I do such things all the time. In fact, when I want my students to be creative and think outside the box, I sometimes tell them to sit in a closet with a flashlight and away from all distractions and try to brainstorm such a list.

2.    Keep Adding to the List: One of the simplest things you can do is to keep adding to the list that you create in #1 above. I have found such a list of names and emails to be invaluable. Over the 2-3 years from initial idea for the TWIO to the recent publication of it, mine became quite impressive. The list grows and grows and grows and will come in handy for follow-up book projects.

3.    Direct Searching of the Web: A second way to find contacts is to simply search the Web. This includes looking in someone’s blog for their email address as well as in their Facebook accounts, homepages, research articles, keynote speeches, and published correspondences. If a person has a Web presence or footprint, you will more than likely locate their email. Most professors and international speakers are easy to find.

4.    Indirect Searching of the Web: Some people are very high up in an organization or institution and do not have time to respond to hundreds of emails each day. As a precaution or security measure, their email is typically not posted anywhere that would be obvious. But you might spot it in strange places. Just go to Google Search and type in the name of the person and the word “email” and you might be surprised what shows up. Sometimes the email is embedded in a discussion forum. This tends to happen when someone posts a query wondering about it and titles it “Does anyone know Steve Jobs’ email?” and then an assortment of people respond to it; most often with guesses based on the name (e.g., steve@mac.com, steve@apple.com. theboss@appl.ecom, Steve.jobs@apple.com,  sjobs@apple.com, jobs@apple.com or createdmanyjobs@apple.com). It is amazing what you can find when you do some searching of discussion forums (see these discussions related to Steve Jobs’ email, for instance, http://forums.appleinsider.com/archive/index.php/t-60371.html or this one, http://www.applefritter.com/node/8969, or http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-162031.html). Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, Tim Berners-Lee., no problem. I saw a discussion of a friend of mine with a very famous computer scientist and was able to obtain his email that way. Keep in mind, that while you might locate their email address, each of these people likely get 1,000’s of such requests per day and they have likely changed it or will never reply to it. Suffice to say, obtaining an email is no guarantee of actual access. But if you find the right access code (i.e., the semi-secret email that the person currently uses), it just might get you a response.

5.    Ask an Expert: If you are seeking the email of someone and you know someone else in that same field or at the same company or organization, ask him or her if they know the email of person you are after. I got the email address of a founder of a Fortune 100 company whom you would likely recognize from a former employee of the company whom I had known for a long time. He was wonderful! He not only gave me some insightful quotes for the book, he ended up writing a fantabulous endorsement. The same was true of several foundation directors, university presidents, and bestselling authors. Many emails of those who endorsed by book were provided to me by their friends and colleagues.

6.    Try to Email “Info,” “Support,” or “Help”: If you have trouble locating an email address of someone, one of the last resorts you have is to the dreaded “support,” “help,” or “info” email address that is typically listed at the project, center, or organization Web site. But if that is all you have, it is all you have. I have been able to contact a few important people this way.

7.    Talk about It: I meet people when at conferences before and after my keynote talks. Sometimes I mention my book project in small conversations with vendors, conference keynotes, or colleagues at the conference. Once in a while, someone will say that they know the person I am seeking to contact. It happened with Marc Andreessen (the creator and founder of Netscape and, more recently, Ning). A vendor I met a year ago told me he was good friends with Andreessen and provided me with two emails I could use to contact him. Unfortunately, he has yet to write me back. But I tried. I exercised my risk muscle.

8.    Create a Personal Challenge: In the book, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” Timothy Ferriss talks about challenge he created for students at Princeton. He offered a roundtrip ticket to anywhere in the world if anyone got a reply from people who seemed quite impossible to reach like Bill Clinton, J.Lo, or J. D. Salinger. They had to get a response to one of three questions. The first time he tried this at Princeton, no one was able to do it. The second time 6 of 17 people did. Instead of being content with a normal life routine like 9 to 5 jobs, Ferriss recommends setting unrealistic goals. To reach out. To try. To stretch that risk muscle. Perhaps make it a personal challenge wherein if you get 3 of the 10 hardest to get emails on your list, you treat yourself to a mini-vacation, bottle of the best champagne you can find, or new clothes. But be prepared for failure. I tried to a former U.S. president and vice president as well as a well known founder of a computer company to endorse my book. None of them did but I got a response from their office managers and secretaries, two of which encouraged me to send a final copy of the book when done. As a result, they are all soon getting signed copies of my book. Sometimes an email helps get you to a secretary or office manager. Sometimes all you have is a physical address of their foundation or other organization or institution and you must send a letter or package to that address via snail mail. Replies to that letter provide you with a foot in the door.

9.    Attend Conference, Institute, or Author Book Signing: It the person whose story or quote you need is a keynote, plenary, or invited speaker at a particular conference that is coming up, you always have the option of attending the conference and then greeting him or her before or after the talk. You might hand this person your business card and ask for one from him or her. You might be so bold so as to write to him or her (if you have the requisite contact information) to meet for a breakfast, lunch, or dinner during the conference. You also might check their book Website for their book promotion schedule and then attend a book signing or “meet the author” session at a conference or in a local bookstore. I attended a talk of a well known technology reviewer for the New York Times when I was a plenary speaker at the Georgia Educational Technology Conference in November 2007. I opened correspondence with him recently by reminding him that I attended his keynote talk and was also an invited speaker at that conference. While he has yet to write back, I at least gave it a shot.

10.    Collect Business Cards: Anyone who gives you a business card is a potential expert that you can contact nearly any day and at any moment of the day. They can open the email from you if they want and when and where they want. But you now have an open license to contact them for relevant and professional matters. Collect business cards when at conferences. They might come in handy. Asking for a business card and then reading through it carefully is a sign of respect, especially in the Asian culture. You might also have one of yours ready (such as in your pocket, purse, bag, or wallet) to give to someone you want to contact later. I often have business cards on me in 3-4 locations (shirt pocket, pants pocket, suit pocket and computer bag). When you hand him or her your business card, typically they will give one back. If they do not, you can always say, “I would love yours as well if you have one handy.” I often fly back home from a conference and sort through the business cards I have collected by region of the world or employment sector. This location- or sector-based organizational method helps me later on in contacting the experts that I need for my book.

Check back in tomorrow for tips 11-20 in “A World of Open Contacts, Pt. III!”

Authoring a book with a title like THE WORLD IS OPEN: HOW WEB TECHNOLOGY IS REVOLUTIONIZING EDUCATION (http://worldisopen.com/) presents the writer with several immediate challenges. First, he must convince the reader that there is, in fact, a revolution going on. The writer must bring this revolution in openness to the lap of every awaiting reader or to the ears of every listener (such as when this book eventually comes out in audio format). Second, he must prove that the world is truly open and not necessarily flat, round, or doomed. This too is a difficult task since a flatter or rounder world is what most people have come to expect and perhaps even enjoy. Millions will have read Thomas Friedman’s, The World Is Flat, and most of those readers raved about it, making this task even more difficult. And, Friedman is trained as a journalist, whereas I am trained as an accountant and educational psychologist. Third, the writer (in this case me) must understand, to some degree, all of the learning technology underpinning this revolution in education. Wow. That too is an extremely daunting task. Each day there is some new technology tool, system, or resource in education or business training to read about, master, and share. And there is some mind-blowing stuff that is announced each day. It just never seems to end. Day after day after day! There is no way to try to know it all.

On top of those three challenges, there is a need to provide support for every key point or idea made in the book. How to do that? One way is through stories, scenarios, cases, and situations. And as shown by Friedman, stories on the ground from personal travel help contextualize as well as legitimize the whole thing. Fortunately, I sometimes give more than 100 talks a year and, as my TravelinEdMan blog moniker indicates (see http://travelinedman.blogspot.com/), I traveled extensively prior to writing this book. I had many stories to tell.

I would like to focus on the fourth challenge in this particular blog post. In the book, THE WORLD IS OPEN (TWIO), there are dozens of stories and hundreds of people who had to be contacted for them. I had to exercise my digital risk muscle on more than one occasion during the drafting of this book. And now again when writing an e-book extension of it. There is a cycle of researching a topic area and beginning to write about it and then contacting people with questions. I mainly had to send an email to people when there were gaps in my knowledge and the expert could help fill some of them in with additional insights and perhaps a quote or two for the book. Other times, I simply wanted the quote from the expert for that section of the book. So how does one build up the confidence and skill to do this?

Tune in tomorrow for Part II of “A World Of Contacts” by Curt Bonk

It was October 2005 when I first spoke on the topic of this book—open education–while doing a keynote speech titled “Oops, Did I Mean to Share that?,” at the E-Learn Conference in Vancouver. Two weeks later I was invited by someone who was in the audience to fly back out to the west coast. He wanted me to speak about this more free and open learning world to Microsoft executives who were flying in to Redmond, Washington from around the world. So I did. Their cool demeanors did not provide any clues about how they felt about the more open world. But my son, Alex, who joined me in the trip, thought it went extremely well. So perhaps it did. Months later, I told him that Microsoft officials must have thought I really meant it when I said that education should be free as it took more than 9 months to get paid for my talk. Such a delay happened to me a few years earlier when an accounting clerk died and my check sat on her desk for a number of months.

Ok, back to the story about the book. Dozens of talks about this topic would occur during the rest of 2005 and into 2006. Soon it was February 2007. My colleague and former student, Dr. Charles Graham from BYU and I drafted a proposal for this book, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education (see http://worldisopen.com/). That was not the original title; instead, that title would evolve over the next 20 months. Many friends would help in the naming process. In a nutshell, Charles and I were planning to do an edited book with contributors being people who had changed the world of education with technology. As we had done with a previous book, “The Handbook of Blended Learning” published in 2006, we compiled a huge and continually growing list of people to write chapters. Positive feedback on our proposals was coming in from many sources—friends, colleagues, publishers, friends of publishers, etc. Some were calling it an educational extension of the popular book, “The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman. So were we.

One person I wrote to at the time was Peter Fingar from Meghan-Kiffer Publishing. Peter had recently published a book “The World is Flat? A Critical Analysis of the New York Times Bestseller by Thomas Friedman.” He was keenly interested in our project. However, he advised me to write the book myself and publish it with him or perhaps think about self-publishing it and he would help. March 2007 came. I met Peter in the Tampa-St. Pete Airport. He bought my family lunch and tried desperately to convince me to take these steps.

I had a difficult decision to make. It become more difficult as books from Meghan-Kiffer arrived in the mail. And more books. Still more books. Some real good ones! Peter was great. I really liked him. So, I was leaning to working with Meghan-Kiffer. But after much agony, I took a risk and wrote the book without an agent or a publisher. As a side note, this was not complete folly; I had briefly chatted with Thomas Friedman via email about my project as well as his publisher. I was hoping that they would pick it up. If not, I had connections at several highly respected publishing companies. On top of that, when done I hired an attorney who specialized in the media and entertainment industries (and were also agents for writers). His role was to help in negotiations with publishers. That was crucial! But I did not get him until late in the process.

So in late June 2007, I started writing. And writing and writing and writing. There were multiple stacks of papers two feet high to wade through. New articles also arrived each day as did announcements about the latest and greatest technology tool or gadget. Just looking at my office would quickly stress anyone out. Sheer chaos! But, with my accounting skills always at the ready, it was organized chaos. To reduce my stress level, I ran every morning for roughly 14 months. Yes, every single, stupid day. And I got stupider and stupider. I ran so much that I nearly blew out my feet. Planter fasciitis was killing both of them. I could barely walk. A boot came to sleep in at night to stabilize the foot. But like Forest Gump, I ran and I ran and I ran. What an idiot I was! While I increased my running, I decreased other things. For instance, no television, no family, no international travel (previously, I was doing 100+ talks per year), and no beer or other forms of alcohol. Having grown up in Milwaukee–the land of beer–the last one hurt worse than the planter fasciitis. Smile.

As I got close to finishing a draft of the book, I hired a couple of editors and reviewers to help me fine tune it. They suffered through some pretty bad versions (though my main problem was writing too much). With their help, the manuscript was finished and sent out for review on August 3, 2008. I then drove up to Madison, Wisconsin to keynote the annual Wisconsin Distance Teaching and Learning Conference (by the way, I head to this conference again next week). My keynote topic would revolve the content of this book. Great feedback there! After a year of writing, that was a relief.

I did not realize that I wrote perhaps 2 times as much as anyone could conceivably publish. Fortunately, Jossey-Bass/Wiley worked with me in the past and knew my overwriting tendencies. My wonderful editor at JB/Wiley, Kate Bradford, helped me whittle down this tome. We cut over 130,000 words. Yes, 130,000 words! She told me that it might be a record. Well, the book came out a couple of week ago and I am now taking that record-setting cut content and smoothing it out and adding new stories to create a free e-book extension at the WorldisOpen.com website.

So that is what happened to the World is Open book project in a nutshell. There is much more in between that I dare not bring up now. I owe a slew of debts to many people. Hundreds of people are mentioned in dozens of stories in “The World is Open” book. My next blog post will explain how I was able to contact these people as well as how I am still contacting them. Back soon.

Writing about free and open education is not easy today. Two or three decades ago, such a topic might have amounted to a thin 100 page book. I could have discussed audiotape speeches, encyclopedia giveaways at the local grocery store, educational television and radio programs late at night, correspondence courses, and local community seminars and workshops that had a corporate or other type of sponsor. And much of that was not even free, nor was it open. I know; I am a product of that age.

Back in the early to mid 1980s, I was a bored CPA and corporate controller who desperately wanted something better. Day after day, it was the old grind just like Bill Murray encountered in Ground Hog Day. Same trial balances, cash flow reports, budget estimations, and accounts receivable to track. Unfortunately, I never got to design those cool ice sculptures that Bill could in the movie. But at night I could take courses at the local community college and college extension to prepare me for graduate school and a much different life. I could also take correspondence courses and television courses from the University of Wisconsin Outreach and Extension program. And I could also read some 12 different journals and magazines to get my brain thinking about graduate school. Learning. I was learning whenever I could. But I did not have a computer except at work.

Once I arrived in Madison for graduate school, I could help create TV courses for others to take. These were created the Wisconsin way—to provide education via a distance to whoever it might serve. We sent education to all corners of the state, whether I was in Milwaukee, Green Bay, Eagle River, Rice Lake, La Crosse, or Madison. Some of that content spread far beyond state borders. The Teachers Tackle Thinking: Critical Thinking in the Classroom course did just that. But it did it through mailed correspondence and TV. Computers were not part of the distribution efforts. Nor was the Internet. We only used that for email and it was just a select few in university settings who did.

Today, with the emergence of the Web, education is sent to all corners of the world. And it happens in a heartbeat, not by snail mail, telex, fax, or prescheduled TV programming. No, today we are in a world where learning, of any type or stripe, is available 24 X 7. And much of it is now free and open. It is as open for you at 6 am as it is for me at 6 pm. It does not really matter much if I am in New York, New Berlin, Newcastle, or some place in New Brunswick or Newfoundland. It is there for the taking. Each of us can now access it.

What will you find? You might be seeking a particular book. If you are, nowadays you can typically explore excerpts of it from the publisher or from Google or Amazon. Often the complete book exists online for personal reading, downloading, or listening to. And some online book services allow you, the reader, to comment on book and discuss it with other readers. Free e-books and similar kinds of content are just the first of the ten openers that I describe in my new book, The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education published by Jossey-Bass in July 2009. There are nine more. I also discuss mobile technology like the iPhone and iPod, virtual worlds like Second Life, and collaborative technology that enable people to work on the same document from wherever they are in the world.

But wait, I have only mentioned four of the ten learning openers. There are still six to go! How about one or two more? Well, today, there are hundreds of colleges and universities placing their courses on the Web for free. Yes, hundreds! But there is typically no instructor behind online courses. Such resources are mainly for exploration only. You might be interested in exploring these courses. You are in luck. The world is open.

To help in your quest for an online education which is free and easy to take part in, there are complete lists of such courses and indexes to find them. Among these resources include the OpenCourseWare finder, the National Repository of Online Courses, and the Open Educational Resources Commons. There is also a brand new free university called the “University of the People” that has recently sprung up as well as “Peer-to-Peer University” wherein you can get a tutor or mentor to help you learn from the free content found online. Here are some links you might explore:

1. OCW Finder: http://ocwfinder.com/
2. National Repository of Online Courses: http://www.montereyinstitute.org/nroc/index.html
3. Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons: http://oercommons.org/
4. The Peer to Peer University (P2PU): http://www.peer2peeruniversity.org
5. University of the People: http://www.uopeople.org/

Are you unemployed or perhaps wanting professional development? Are you looking for more free and open stuff? There are complete lists of the 100 best online courses or podcasts. Perhaps try out some of these links.
1. 100 Best Websites for Free Adult Education
http://www.onlinedegreeworld.com/blog/2009/100-best-websites-for-free-adult-education/
2. 100 of the Weirdest Open Courseware Classes that Anyone can Take
http://www.onlinebestcolleges.com/blog/2009/100-weirdest-open-courseware-classes-that-anyone-can-take/
3. Skip the Tuition: 100 Free Podcasts from the Best Colleges in the World:
http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/skip-the-tuition:-100-free-podcasts-from-the-best-colleges-in-the-world

I discuss such free course content in Chapter 5 and 6 of my book (Openers 4 and 5 related to free online courses and learning portals).

Are you interested in the free community college courses that the Obama administration just announced funding for? Well Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California already has 8 such courses on the Web for free in their SOPHIA project (Sharing Of Free Intellectual Assets; see http://sofia.fhda.edu/gallery/). They also are working on free and open textbooks (http://www.collegeopentextboo the ks.org/). Many of us who have children in high school or college are crying out for free and open access digital textbooks (I have 2 in college now…yikes!). Even if you do not have kids, you like are aware that the cost of textbooks has gotten out of hand! The good people at Foothill have created a consortium of community colleges to showcase open educational resources and generally help in these efforts to make education more free and open (http://oerconsortium.org).

This is not the same world that I was in back in 1984 and 1985. Back then I struggled to find the courses I needed in psychology to get into graduate school. So much more is available today to learn from. There are YouTube videos as well as videos from CNN, the BBC, and Google Video. There are blogs to reflect on my ideas. There are wikis like Wikipedia to find information as well as contribute to it. In fact, there is so much available today that people are easily overwhelmed by it all. I know I am. I created a mnemonic aid to help people understand the 10 trends or openers of the book. That mnemonic spells “WE-ALL-LEARN.”

Writing The World Is Open book and summarizing all the trends in the WE-ALL-LEARN model was a mind-boggling experience. So much stuff to read and try to summarize. I think I went a tad loopy during the process. Now I am taking the 120,000 words that my editor and I cut and smoothing it out and adding new content to it. I am creating a free e-book extension of The World is Open book (see http://worldisopen.com/). It will be posted in a couple of months to the WorldisOpen.com website. Already all the references and Web resources mentioned in the book are there as well as a prequel and a postscript. If you explore any of this, your feedback is always welcome. Enjoy the open learning world!

. . .says leading education expert, Professor Curtis J. Bonk, author of “THE WORLD IS OPEN: HOW WEB TECHNOLOGY IS REVOLUTIONIZING EDUCATION” and Professor at the School of Education at Indiana University. The nearly 10 percent growth rate for online enrollment far exceeds the 1.5 percent growth of the overall higher-education student population.

According to a recent Sloan Survey of Online Learning, 70 percent of colleges reported that competition for students interested in online learning is increasing and 58 percent of all colleges surveyed agreed that online courses were strategically critical. In the United States, as parents struggle to find a way to pay for tuition and room and board at even more modestly priced community colleges and state schools, it is likely that the demand for online learning services will continue to grow. While online visitors to the top institutions cannot earn college credits, Ivy leagues like Harvard and Yale are offering full course materials — lecture, notes, readings and class syllabuses for anytime with the time and the interest. The most ambitious online education is offered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which offers an astounding 1,800 classes online.

“It is the opening up of education that ultimately makes a flatter or a more robust economic world possible,” says leading education expert Professor Curtis J. Bonk, Professor at the School of Education at Indiana University and author of THE WORLD IS OPEN: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education (Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley: August; 2009). In the twenty-first century, education trumps economy as the key card to participation in the world.” THE WORLD IS OPEN contends that the rise of the Open Educational Resource movement is an exciting development made possible by the web. Universities such as MIT have already placed large educational resource materials on the web, free to use by people anywhere in the world. The ramifications of the open educational system are profound and far reaching beyond the shores of America. From Nebraska to Nairobi, people across the world who do not have access to libraries or textbooks can find educational resources at their fingertips.

“Now anyone can learn anything, anywhere, at anytime. We can work online from research vessels in Antarctic waters to ranches in South Africa,” says Bonk. “In the coming years, billions of people will be utilizing the web for at least part of their education.”